Glossary - 3Com 4005 Installation And Maintenance Manual

ambient air temperature
ASIC
autonegotiation
backbone
backplane
bandwidth
bridge
bus topology
campus network
client/server
collision
connectionless
communications
connection-oriented
communications
G
LOSSARY
The temperature of air that surrounds any electrical part or device. Usually refers
to the effect of such temperature in aiding or slowing down removal of heat by
radiation and convection from the part or device in question.
Application Specific Integrated Circuit. A chip that is custom designed for a
specific application.
A feature that allows some 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports to
self-determine the proper setting for one or more of the following features
between two devices: speed, duplex mode, or flow control.
A relative term that refers to the main segment of a network. A campus backbone
typically runs between buildings. A building backbone connects departments or
floors within a building. A backbone can even function on a large scale
metropolitan or national data or telecommunications network.
The main bus, or physical set of traces, that carries data within a chassis.
Data measured in bits per second that a channel can transmit. The theoretical
bandwidth for an Ethernet segment is 10 mega bits per second (Mbps); for a Fast
Ethernet, 100 Mbps; and for Gigabit Ethernet, 1000 Mbps.
Equipment that connects different LANs, allowing communication between
devices that reside on separate LAN segments or collision domains. Bridges are
protocol-independent, but hardware-specific, with communication limited to the
data link layer (Layer 1) and physical layer (Layer 2) of the OSI reference model.
A network architecture that has all of its nodes connected to a single cable. A
star-wired topology is usually preferred over a bus topology.
A LAN that consists of several smaller LANs within and between buildings.
A single-user computer that requests application or network services from a server.
CoS Class of Service. A process which differentiates traffic into eight numbered classes
and assigns priorities to those classes. Some network devices can read those
priorities and process traffic in accordance with those priorities.
Overlapping transmission of two or more Ethernet nodes onto media. All data is
unusable. Both cease transmitting and restart at random intervals.
A form of packet-switching that relies on global addresses in each packet rather
than on predefined virtual circuits.
A form of packet-switching that requires a predefined circuit from source to
destination to be established before data can be transferred.